Stiletto

by Daniel O'Malley

  “Marcel came up with the original in the seventies, I think,” said Pim. “He must have perfected it since. It may even react specifically to the bone of one of us. Very clever old man.” He shook his head.

  “Unfortunately for him, it was in the files Claudia grabbed. And I made a vaccine for it. It took a while to activate, but it worked. We are prepared for all of their weapons. So fuck Marcel, and fuck them all. Their hidden weapon failed.” He was smiling now, and it wasn’t a particularly nice smile. Then there was the sound of a phone ringing. He turned away to answer it and spoke some words in Dutch. He hung up and turned back to Felicity.

  “Hmm. I will come back to you in a bit,” he said.

  So I’ll be alive then?

  “I want a much closer look inside you. But for the moment, my girl is waiting to have a talk.”

  Oh, Odette’ll be thrilled to see you, she thought. I’ll just stay here, shall I?

  She heard him walk away.

  Wanker.

  49

  All right,” said Claudia. “Pim will be here in a minute.” She hadn’t had to pick up a phone or anything; she had simply cocked her head and moved her lips a few times. Odette nodded, leaned forward in her chair, rested her elbows on the table, and put her hands over her eyes. The others in the room sat solemnly, except for Sophie Gestalt, who picked up a magazine and flipped through it.

  Odette’s head was churning. There were so many things she needed to say to Pim, and she needed to get them absolutely perfect.

  If I just say it the right way, then I can convince him, she told herself. I can tell him about Felicity and how she’s actually a good person despite being Checquy. That most of the Checquy actually seem like good people despite being Checquy. I can tell him about how she and I worked together to fight monsters who hurt people but who were really themselves people who had been hurt. And that it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done.

  And I’ll explain to him that all the things we love in humanity, the big ideas and the little kindnesses, they’re so delicate. They’re so easily smashed. That what the Antagonists are doing makes the world a worse place. And the Checquy helps to keep the world stable. They keep peace.

  I can make him see that it’s not too late. I know I can.

  She heard the sound of a door opening and closing. I won’t look up, she thought. Not yet. She heard his footsteps coming closer and the little sounds of other people turning in their chairs to see him.

  “Odette?” Pim said finally.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Aren’t you going to look at me?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, and she looked up.

  She was relieved to see that he was still the same, that he hadn’t changed his face. The face she loved. Despite herself, despite all her concerns, she was so happy to see him. And then she felt a hand close around her heart.

  His mouth was opening to say something, but his expression was confused as, without meaning to, Odette found herself standing up. What am I doing? she thought. Her limbs had moved without her conscious effort. And now her joints were locking. Everyone was looking at her warily, and she wanted to say that it wasn’t her, that she didn’t understand either, but she couldn’t speak. Her body took a long, deep breath—more breath than she thought she’d have room for—and her jaws forced themselves wide open.

  She screamed.

  It was a sound unlike anything Odette had ever heard before. It had parts of her own voice woven into it, at least at the beginning, but they were overlaid with the voice of someone else—a different woman. The two screams twined around each other, almost like a duet. And then the sound rose up and up, and all traces of Odette were lost, left behind. There was only that strange voice, that woman’s voice she did not know, coming out of her. And she couldn’t stop.

  Pain sparked all through her body. Her wrists stung, and she felt as if she were being stabbed all over her torso, in her eyes, in her muscles. A wave of agony washed through her. Her eyes rolled up, and she saw that she wasn’t the only one affected.

  Next to her, Claudia was shuddering, and the cords that emerged from her eyes clacked and rustled against each other. Inside the clear plastic, Odette could see, the tiny nerves grew black and broke. Blood flooded through the tubes and then it, too, turned black.

  It’s destroying our implants! Odette realized dazedly.

  Simon had his hand on her wrist, and she felt his rubbery white surgical skin become liquid. No, I don’t want to see! Odette thought, and she had enough control left to close her eyes. He was shouting something, but she couldn’t understand the words, heard only the sound of his voice falling away into gurglings. His hand slid off her and he crumpled to the floor, tearing down one of the blinds as he fell.

  She opened her eyes a crack and saw that Saskia was crawling across the table to her. Her once-beautiful eyes were now bloody red. Black lines around her neck showed where gills had been hidden, ready to open and let her breathe in the ocean. Now they were rotting inside her. Her elbows buckled, and she fell on the table. Saskia’s spurs were unsheathed. They were beautiful little blades, sculpted to be razor sharp, and they were dripping with venom. With all her strength, she pulled herself closer and closer to Odette. Her eyes had lost their focus, but they were still fixed on Odette.

  Yes! thought Odette. Please! Do it! Kill me! Anything to stop this!

  But instead, the elegant little weapons fell away from Saskia’s wrists, trailing strings of muscle and ligament. She stared at her forearms and then looked up at Odette. They were both thinking of the same thing, Odette knew: The little sacs tucked away in Saskia’s forearms. Carefully cocooned in layers of bone and Kevlar, and full of poison. Odette felt her own sacs shred and disintegrate inside her arms, but they were empty, drained in that attic in Muirie.

  She saw the moment when Saskia was killed by her own body. Her friend’s torso stiffened and then thrashed as the venom rushed through her. Then she was still. Odette had no idea what toxins Saskia had carried in her—she’d kept changing them, going for the more and more exotic.

  But still Odette kept screaming.

  And Pim was turning, stumbling, trying to get away from her. Run! she thought desperately. I love you! Get out! He shambled into the shadows, where she saw him totter and fall. A dark shape that lay still.

  They’re all dead, she thought dully. Am I going to be allowed to die too? She could feel her implants being destroyed, but the pain no longer registered. It was just a sensation. Her muscles were breaking down, and her eyes were losing focus. Her skin burned.

  Finally, the screaming stopped. There were no echoes—there hadn’t been any sound for a long time. Odette staggered on her feet, then fell backward, sprawling on the floor. She felt wetness under her hand and didn’t want to know what it was from. All she could do was suck air in through her burning throat.

  She discovered that she could cry. So she cried until her tear ducts stopped working. And then she lay there, breathing.

  “Well, they didn’t see that coming,” croaked a voice. It took all her strength, but Odette managed to flop herself over. Her limbs were rubbery and smacked on the floor. Beyond the mess that was Simon’s body, she saw the source of the voice. It was Gestalt. The blond woman lay on her back, but she turned her head to stare at Odette. “Judging from your reaction,” she said, “I don’t think you saw it coming either.”

  Odette couldn’t even shake her head, but she found that she could speak, sort of. Her voice was raspy.

  “I don’t even know what it was,” she said. “I—I think my great-uncle put something into me. A weapon.” She was thinking of the surgery that she had gotten at the last minute before coming to England and that, in her naïveté, she had been so thrilled to receive. They trusted me, she thought. But trusted me to do what?

  Gestalt opened her mouth to say something, and clear liquid ran out of her throat and over her lips. She spat. “Please excuse that,” she said. “I was going to say, c
ongratulations, you’re a soldier. A Pawn. They use you. It’s how it works. You wouldn’t believe the number of people I sent off to their deaths.”

  “Did they know you were sending them off to die?” asked Odette bitterly.

  “Not always. But whatever your family put in you, it certainly did a number on Grafter organs. My spine is killing me.”

  “They put implants in you?” asked Odette. “In that body?” Her gaze flickered up and down Sophie.

  “Oh, yes,” said Gestalt. “Quite a few. Of course, in all the bodies, there was always that phone thing so the one girl could look out through my eyes.”

  “Claudia,” she said weakly. Claudia, who was sitting dead in her chair, still plugged into the wall.

  “Whatever,” said Gestalt. “They had to put a different face on the other body, the male I used at Hill Hall. It was too recognizably a Gestalt’s. And in this one they jacked up my reflexes a bit. So I could take out that Pawn in the lift and spray you two down.”

  “I suppose those implants don’t seem like the best idea now,” remarked Odette.

  “Oh, it’s just a body,” said Gestalt.

  “And you’ve got your new ones, your free bodies, don’t you?” Gestalt didn’t say anything, but she looked pleased. “And you think that you can trust my friends? How can you be sure that those zygotes haven’t been tampered with?”

  “They’re clean.” Gestalt coughed. “I’ve had enough bodies now to know the difference.”

  “So what, then?” said Odette. “Your bodies will grow up and meet and have more Gestalt babies?”

  Gestalt managed a sort of shrug. “Something like that.”

  “You realize that all your new bodies are the result of incest?” said Odette.

  “Of course I do,” said Gestalt. “I did have sex with myself.” Odette winced. She couldn’t help but be disgusted by the idea.

  “It’s not the religious taboos I’m thinking of,” said Odette. “It’s a small gene pool you’re drawing from, and it will be getting smaller all the time.”

  “I’ll be very organized about it,” said Gestalt. “But I’m not relying on immortality. Every new baby is another generation I’ll get to live. And who knows what clever science the world will come up with in the next couple of lifetimes?”

  Oh yeah, thought Odette weakly. Clever science is terrific. Look where it got me.

  “Maybe I’ll study it myself,” Gestalt mused. “One of my bodies could do a degree. I’ll have a lot of time since I’ll have no Checquy to worry about. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” said the rotting woman, “they’re serving spaghetti Bolognese at the Gallows Keep prison tonight, and it’s my favorite.” Her eyes glazed as the mind of Gestalt withdrew from the Sophie-body.

  And then Odette was alone. She imagined a blond man with Sophie’s eyes coming awake in a small locked room somewhere in Scotland.

  I’m going to die here, she thought. I’m dying alone with the corpses of my best friends. She closed her eyes.

  And then she remembered Alessio and the attack that was to be made.

  There’s nothing I can do, she thought weakly. I can’t stand up; I don’t think I can even scream for help. She wished suddenly that Gestalt hadn’t left. I could have tried to persuade her to alert the authorities. Her imprisoned bodies could have told the guards. Word might have gotten through. Gestalt might have bought herself a few privileges in prison—something to make the time pass faster until the new bodies were ready.

  But there was no guarantee that Gestalt would have agreed to any such thing. They would probably want as little attention paid to their doings with the Antagonists as possible.

  They’re going to win, she thought. The Antagonists’ attack on those children is going to smash the negotiations. There will be no chance of peace—they were right about that. And Pim and Saskia and Claudia and Simon would have considered dying to be a small price to pay. Look at everything they were willing to do. Claudia, plugged into the wall. Saskia letting her friend use her eyes. Simon working away in those suites, turning innocent people into weapons. Simon walking over the bodies in the fog to retrieve me. Felicity told me how jauntily he’d moved, taking out his mobile phone and calling the others to let them know their beloved friend was being brought back to them.

  Calling them on the phone.

  Simon has a phone.

  In front of her, Simon’s body was withered and black. His surgical skin had proven to be especially vulnerable to that horrible scream. Brown liquid had soaked through his suit and spread out in a puddle around him. Odette tried to move her arm, and ribbons of fire shot across her shoulders. This is what rotting muscle feels like, she thought. It feels like shit.

  All her Grafter muscles were dead, but she knew that there were still thin cores of her own, natural muscle buried underneath. So, it really will be all me. She strained, and her arm moved a little. Just a little. Progress, she thought. Now, a little more. Every few minutes, she managed to jerk her arm a little closer to the edge of Simon’s coat. Sweat soaked her clothes. She was horribly aware that time was passing, that at any moment, Mariette might begin unleashing something horrible on a group of schoolchildren in a museum.

  Finally her fingers closed on the cloth and she managed to walk them up his coat, scrabbling against the wet material and then pulling it open. Then, in a moment of divine mercy, his phone slid out of his inside pocket. It took as much concentration as performing microsurgery on an infant’s eye, but Odette found a way to bat the phone toward her until it was lying by her face.

  I did it!

  Now, what’s the damn number? It was growing hard to think, but she managed, with all the strength of her will, to recall her brother’s phone number and dial. It rang and rang again. If it just goes to voice mail, thought Odette, then I am going to . . . to . . . well, I’ll probably just die here in a puddle of slime, knowing that it’s all over.

  “Hello?”

  He’s alive! “’Lethio,” she said, her tongue thick in her mouth.

  “Odette? You sound terrible,” he said cheerfully. “Whose phone are you using?”

  “Where are you?” she said, gasping. “Are you okay?”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Are you okay?” she said. She would have screamed it if she could.

  “I’m fine,” he said defensively. “I’m with the school group, we’re at the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

  “Gimme teacher right now. Now.” He must have detected her urgency, because after a few scuffling sounds and some distant conversations, the phone was passed over.

  “This is Cathy Tipper” came a voice. It was a very gentle voice.

  “Pawn Tipper?” Odette asked intently. She wanted to make sure that she was talking to someone who had actual powers to protect her brother.

  “Yes,” said the teacher.

  “Pawn, ’m Odette, ’Lethio’s sister. I’m with the delegation.” She paused for breath. “There will be an attack on you, in the art museum. Any moment. Unnerstand?”

  “Understood,” said the teacher.

  “P’tect ’em. Get ’em out.”

  “Yes,” said the teacher. She snapped out orders in a drill sergeant’s tone, something about formation and securing vulnerables. Odette had the impression that the orders were being given, not to any other teachers or accompanying guards, but to the students. “They’ll be safe,” the teacher said, coming back on the line. “Now, where are you? Hello?”

  Odette could hear the voice faintly, but she couldn’t answer. The phone lay by her face, but all she could do was draw long, slow breaths. Eventually, the voice on the phone stopped. Odette missed it a little. It was nice to have some company. She felt the sunshine move onto her face, and she closed her eyes. The warmth poured onto her eyelids and took the chill off the sweat and the slime. She felt as if she were floating in the light.

  I wonder why I’m dying so much more slowly than the others did, she thought absently. She had no idea how l
ong she’d been lying there, drifting in and out of consciousness. She remembered a period when her legs had twitched violently and woken her up, but that had stopped after a while. Good-bye, spine. She barely realized it when she wet herself.

  Maybe she slept. She had visions. They might have been dreams, or perhaps they were memories fluttering up as her brain began to shut down. But they were all good images, of simple things. A pond, a vase, a dress, a kiss.

  She was awake but lost in a reverie, so she didn’t hear the door open or the faltering steps that came across the carpet. As if from very, very far away, she heard Felicity’s voice saying her name, and, somehow, though she could not move, she smiled.

  50

  Felicity lay on that table for hours, they later told Odette. She’d lain there long enough for the paralytic chemicals Pim had injected into her to wear off. Long enough for Felicity to roll herself off the table in the suite and put on a shirt.

  The skin room she’d been in was not looking healthy. Whatever poisonous smoke had come out of her veins had left the place looking decidedly seedy, but the sphincters that held the door shut remained firmly clenched. Felicity tried cutting her way out with a bone scalpel, and then with a bone knife. Finally she picked up an alarming-looking surgical saw and hacked her way out into a very corporate hallway.

  Exhausted, clutching the walls, she sent her Sight gliding through the offices. She saw the corpses lying about and Odette sprawled on the floor, just barely alive. She hobbled through the hallways as quickly as she could and made it to the conference room. The smell was horrific, all the corpses slumped in pools of fluid. And there was her friend, lying very still.

  “Odette, are you all right? What happened to you?”

  “Flssss,” Odette bubbled.

  “Good to see you too, babe,” said Felicity, coming closer. “Although you look really bad.” She sat down beside the Grafter and gingerly took her friend’s sticky hand. Then she picked up the phone that was lying by Odette’s face. It was odd-looking—much chunkier than most phones today. Then she saw that there was still a call in progress, and the counter on the bottom of the screen showed it had been going on for a few hours. She tentatively put it up to her face.